Brixton tube station’s new mural explores identity and power by Claudette Johnson

A new artwork has appeared in Brixton tube station, as Turner Prize 2024 nominee Claudette Johnson has installed a new mural above the station entrance.

The space is used by Art on the Underground for site-specific commissions, and here, Johnson has created Three Women, a three-part artwork known as a triptych that features Black female figures referenced in one of her previous works, Trilogy 1982-86, which she created in the 1980s.

The sitting positions of the Black female figures share a resonance with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting by Picasso, whose problematic and fractured engagement with African art and the female form marked shifts in Johnson’s early work, evoked questions about how she might locate herself in her work, and as a Black woman confront the denials and distortions of Western art history.

With Three Women, Johnson returns to these questions with three subjects instilled with a self-possessed subjectivity that runs counter to the eroticised forms and colonial gaze of modernist art movements.

Claudette Johnson, said: “Three Women was inspired by an earlier work, Trilogy 1982-86, which depicts three standing figures adopting poses that reflect their way of being in the world. In Three Women, I have loosely referenced Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon by having the sitters adopt seated poses that reflect those of some of ‘les demoiselles’. I am fascinated by the power that emanates from these postures and this is borne from my longstanding interest in women, power and how we claim space in places where we have been absent, obscured, caricatured or denied.”

Three Women will be on view for a year and is the latest in a series of commissions for the station, following artists including Denzil Forrester, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Joy Labinjo. Initiated in 2018, the programme invites artists to respond to the diverse narratives of the area, in recognition of the local murals painted in Brixton in the 1980s.